Ashes of Heaven (The Plainsmen Series)

by Terry C. Johnston

  “What will you do?” asked No Neck.

  “We will hunt buffalo and elk, antelope and deer, as we always have,” Lame Deer explained as he rose to his feet. “And we will continue to wander these hunting grounds our peoples have been given by Wakan Tanka. Never will we hold out our hands to take what the white man offers us!”

  Chapter 3

  27 January 1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  Army Re-organization.

  WASHINGTON, January 27.—The commission appointed to prepare a plan for a re-organization of the army, report to the president that there has been a very general discussion and interchange of opinions, but other important matters have so occupied them that they have not been able to give the subject that attention and deliberation its importance demands, and cannot therefore make recommendations.

  Everyone was Irish today.

  With the music and revelry of this celebration for young Colin Teig, everyone who came that afternoon had a touch of the Irish in them.

  Both a sergeant from one of the infantry companies and a corporal from a cavalry outfit brought their scratched and scuffed violin cases. Another cavalryman brought his well-traveled banjo, while a fourth pulled a harmonica and Jew’s harp from the pocket of his coat the moment he stepped inside the rooms where others had hurriedly pushed all the furniture back against the walls.

  How just the sight of those musical instruments made Samantha’s eyes sparkle with mischief! Why, not even in Denver or Cheyenne City had the two of them listened, much less danced, to lively music. Then he remembered—they hadn’t danced since their wedding day on Sharp Grover’s place back in the summer of 1875 when Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry and Miles’s Fifth Infantry brought an end to the Great Buffalo War with the Comanche, Kiowa, and Southern Cheyenne.*

  “May I have this dance, madam?” he asked, slipping his arm around her waist.

  Samantha turned, grinning as she rarely did, her pale, slightly freckled face flush with the cold, rosy with excitement. How those green eyes did reflect her love for him. “What of Colin?”

  “Here,” Martha Luhn said, taking the infant from Sam’s arms. “Give the li’l tyke to me and go dance with your mister!”

  Seamus winked at the officer’s wife. “Thank you, Martha.” Then he took a step back, laid his right arm across his waist and bowed gallantly. “Mrs. Donegan, would you do me the honor of this dance?”

  How she made his heart flutter as she gazed at him beneath those long eyelashes, cocking her head to the side coyly, then curtsying elegantly. “If you’ll watch out for my feet with those big hooves of yours—”

  Before she could finish, he seized her left hand and flung his right arm around her. He whirled Samantha out among the few who were daring enough to venture into the center of the room with that first song the fiddlers and banjo player began to scratch out.

  Round and round he whirled her with crazed abandon, sensing her finally relax as she gave herself over to him while he slipped into a clumsy rhythm—twirling her round and round, listening to the thumping of other feet, the clapping of all those hands, the twang-twang-twang of the jew’s harp. And with every step he made sure not to raise one of his big feet off the ground far enough to catch one of hers beneath it.

  “I didn’t take you fellers for Irish!” he exclaimed breathlessly as he rolled up before the musicians after a second song, Samantha clasped against him beneath an arm.

  “My grandpappy,” explained one who held a violin. “He taught me what I know of fiddling.”

  “I ain’t Irish,” the older infantryman admitted with a wag of his head and a big smile emerging beneath his shaggy horseshoe of a mustache. His sergeant’s chevrons were well faded from many a washing, many a march beneath the western sun. “But I learned my Irish tunes during the war against the Johnnies.”

  Everyone was Irish today! Every last woman and child, every last man jack of them. When those fiddles started crying and that banjo began plinking, when a few of those women got out there in the middle of it all and hiked up their layers of skirts and petticoats only high enough to allow them to kick up their heels and clog until they were breathless and beaded in sweat, then Seamus knew they couldn’t have had a better christening celebration in County Kilkenny itself.

  From time to time Seamus would wheel onto the floor with young Colin Teig wrapped securely in his arms, where father and son would bend and whirl and spin, eliciting wild giggles from the boy as he carried him round and round, and in among the other dancers. As the pair wheeled past, all of them reached out to pinch a cheek or pat the youngster’s arm. At other times, Seamus would sit in one of the simple ladder-backed chairs, little Colin propped on his knee so the youngster faced the dancers, and there he bounced and waggled his firstborn in time to the music.

  “Seamus,” Samantha said later. “Let me take him.”

  “We’re doing just fine here together, him and me!” Seamus protested as Sam held out her hands.

  She leaned forward to whisper, “You’ve got to find something more to drink, husband.”

  “More still?” he squeaked in disbelief. “It feels like I just got back from the trader’s with that last armload!”

  “Dancing works up a sweat, Mr. Donegan,” Nettie Capron said at Samantha’s side. “And there’s a heap o’ dancing going on here for your son’s day!”

  “For the love of the Virgin Mary,” he exclaimed as he stood, handing the boy to his mother. “I’ll go see what I can haggle out of Collins now.”

  Samantha kissed the boy’s cheek as the child twisted himself in her arms so he could watch all the action. “Where are you getting the money for all this … this celebration in a bottle you’re buying everyone, Seamus?”

  “Not yours to worry about, my bride,” and he smiled down at her, squeezing her against him.

  “I can only imagine you had some pay built up for all that time you were away,” she said, standing on her toes and speaking into his ear. “But, I can’t imagine how you’d have anything left after the two dresses and that pair of new blankets, along with that cloth you bought for me to make Colin some clothes. This army must pay you much better to scout for it than it pays its own officers!”

  He kissed Sam lightly, squarely on the mouth, something he rarely did in public. Then looked down into those green eyes filled with surprise. “Yes, my beautiful bride, mother of my son. The army pays its scouts well enough that I can provide for my family without worry. I’ll be back from the trader’s straightaway.”

  Bundled in their coats and mufflers and hats against the horrid cold, the men stepped out on the front porch from time to time to puff on their pipes or smoke their cheroots away from the women and children who frolicked and laughed inside. Now for a third time Seamus himself pulled on his coat and went outside, trudging quickly through the snow to trader Collins’s saloon where he purchased another armload of brown and green bottles—more whiskey for the hard drinkers, as well as brandy for the ladies and those who preferred to sip their libations.

  “You’ll give me a fair price now?” he had prodded the trader the day before when working out their arrangement.

  Collins had licked his lower lip. “You said you were paying in cash? No I.O.U. drawn against future payroll?”

  Seamus had grinned and patted the lower right pocket of his worn vest. “Army scrip, trader. I’ll pay you now for what we’ll drink tomorrow. Now tell me, just how fair you going to make your prices for a father what has a naming to celebrate?”

  Donegan did indeed have money. For the first time in his life he had no worry in buying his friends their drinks. Nor did he have any fear he would end up drinking away everything and have nothing left for Samantha and Colin Teig. General George Crook had seen to that.

  The morning after he had returned to Fort Laramie, right after untangling himself from his wife’s leggy warmth, Seamus had reported to the post commander’s office.

  “There’s no doubt what you’ve come for, Mr. Donegan,
” Major Andrew E. Evans said as he shuffled through some papers atop a desk littered with duty rosters and daily reports from Camp Robinson.

  Standing stiffly on the other side of the desk, Seamus glanced at the post’s commanding officer. The two of them had shared the battlefield at the Rosebud, shared Crook’s horse-meat march to the Black Hills. “If you mean the money that’s to be waiting for me, Colonel,” he replied, using Evans’s brevet rank, “that’s what I’ve come for.”

  “Here it is,” Laramie’s commander sighed, pulling out a brown envelope. Folding back its flap, the major in the Third U.S. Cavalry pulled out a bundle of scrip enclosed within a sheet of paper. Dropping the stack of army pay on the desk, Evans quickly reread the page. “Yes, I remember this now.” He looked up at Donegan. “General Crook left orders that I was to hold this until your return … or, until the first of May.”

  “The first of May, Colonel?”

  Setting the paper down, the major cleared his throat and said, “At that time I was to call in your missus. With orders to explain what might have happened to you. And to give her this money at that time.”

  “Just what Crook and Mackenzie said they’d do.”

  “Are you surprised,” asked the officer of the day, an infantryman, as he stepped up to Evans’s elbow, “that either of them would be men of honor?”

  “Colonel Evans here can tell you just how much stock I put in the word of another man.”

  “So, Mr. Donegan,” Evans began, picking up the bundle of scrip, “here you are. As guaranteed by General Crook himself. All I need you to do is to sign this voucher that you’ve received—”

  “I don’t want it all, sir,” he interrupted, watching his words bring Evans up short.

  “Not all?”

  “Those orders left by General Crook, sir? If I could make the same request of you personally, Colonel, I’d be in your debt.”

  “The same request?”

  “I’ll take some of the money, yes, sir. To buy my bride a new dress or two. Wrangle some whiskey out of the trader, and have ourselves a proper Irish christening for my boy. The rest, I want you to hang onto for safekeeping.”

  “Hang onto your pay, is it?”

  “Yes. I’d be in your debt if you’d hold most of it for me.”

  “I’m no banker, Mr. Donegan.”

  “And I’m no eleven-dollar-a-month soldier, Colonel.” He tried to make it come out as gently as he could. “But there’s still unfinished business up north, and I figure that means there’ll be some work for a man who’s had him some experience guiding for General Miles’s army.”

  “Work up north, you say.”

  “They say Sitting Bull’s north of the Missouri—likely heading for Canada where he’ll be out of reach,” the Irishman explained. “And Crazy Horse is somewhere south of the Yellowstone. Miles plans on going after him as soon as the rivers free up.”

  “And you’ll be going with Miles, I assume?”

  “It’s what I do, Colonel. Until this land is safe for my wife and boy, until I can find another way to put a roof over their heads and food in their bellies—I’ll be an army scout. Yes, sir. When General Miles marches south from Tongue River Cantonment this spring, I plan on being with his column.”

  Slowly a smile of admiration came across Evans’s face. “So perhaps you can tell me, Mr. Donegan. How much are two women’s dresses, along with enough whiskey to throw yourself a good Irish celebration, all going to cost you?”

  He felt a flutter in his chest that he hadn’t felt in so, so long. Rather than scraping by hard-scrabble, living with what he was given or could beg off others, Seamus Donegan could now afford the best of what he wanted.

  “I s’pose I could have you give me fifty dollars of that scrip.”

  “And I’ll keep the rest here for you,” Evans said as he bent over the paper, pulled a pen from its holder, and dipped it in the inkwell.

  “For me, or for my wife, sir.”

  The major stayed his hand a moment, then straightened and looked squarely into Donegan’s eyes. “You tell me a date I should expect you back from the north country, Mr. Donegan. A date you will want me to call your missus to my office.”

  He cleared his throat, glanced at the two other soldiers, then stared out the frost-rimed window to the stone guardhouse in the distance. “I figure, Colonel … I should be back by autumn.”

  “Shall we make it the end of summer then?”

  “Yes, sir. The war should be over then.”

  “All right,” Evans said and went back to writing. “We’ll put it down here. By 1 September 1877.” When he had finished, he turned the paper around and held out the pen to the Irishman. “I need you to sign there at the bottom, Mr. Donegan. To show that I’m giving you fifty of your dollars.”

  Taking the pen clumsily in his big hand, Seamus suddenly felt the hot flush of self-consciousness. He rolled it over and over between his fingers, staring at it. So odd. He couldn’t remember the last time he had held a pen in his hand.

  “You do know how to write, don’t you, Mr. Donegan?”

  “Yes, Colonel,” he replied, then bent over the page and thoughtfully, precisely, wrote his name. “It’s just been a long, long time.”

  Taking up the page, the major blew on the civilian’s signature as he held out a small stack of the army scrip. “Your fifty dollars.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.”

  “One more thing, Mr. Donegan,” the post commander said as the civilian was turning to leave. “Am I invited to this christening for your son?”

  “Yes, Colonel! By all means. We’ve shared the battlefield. Come and celebrate with my family! Bring your wife. Your family, sir.” Then he quickly looked at the other officers behind Evans. “Your men as well. The more’s the better to us Irish. Come and bring your families and celebrate with me and my wife.”

  “It would be an honor, Mr. Donegan,” Evans said as he drew himself up and saluted the surprised civilian. “To attend the naming of a child born to an honorable man who sees so well to his family’s needs, the same way he steps forward to play such a selfless role in his nation’s business. I’ll be there.”

  Chapter 4

  1 February 1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  MISSOURI.

  The Ice Breaking Up Again.

  ST. LOUIS, January 31.—The Steamer Belle St. Louis was cut down by moving ice to-day at St. Genevieve, some sixty miles from here, and will probably be a total loss. She was owned by the Belle St. Louis Transportation company, and had run in the Missouri river until that river closed last fall, when she went into the Memphis trade and was en route to that city when she was forced to lay up on account of ice … Most of the steamers at the levee and along shore between here and the arsenal have steam up, so that they may be ready to move with the ice when it starts, and various other precautions have been taken to insure against the destruction of river craft and property.

  “You sure I can’t talk you into staying for the spring campaign?”

  Luther S. Kelly turned to find Colonel Nelson A. Miles approaching. “No, General,” he replied, respectfully using the officer’s brevet rank. “Pretty much made up my mind. I haven’t been east since the Civil War.”

  Kelly continued to stand at the edge of the trees, watching the small detail of mounted infantry wrangle a half-dozen hardy pack mules away from Tongue River Cantonment. Two civilian riders were leading the soldiers south that cold, gray, snowy morning.

  “I can understand your homesickness,” Miles sympathized.

  “Not so much that, General,” Luther attempted to explain as he watched the riders angle up a snowy hillside in single file. “I just figure right now is about the best time for me to get back there to see what friends and family I have left.”

  “They won’t all come in, Luther,” Miles admitted glumly after a moment of silence. “No matter how sweet the plum I hold out to them.”

  “I don’t figure they all will, either.”

&n
bsp; “And those who remain out will be the hardest of the lot, don’t you know,” the soldier sighed in resignation. “Those who refuse to surrender will be the toughest bastards to drive back to their agencies.”

  “You’ve been chivvying the toughest of the bastards all winter, General. Sitting Bull’s holdouts up there on the Missouri. And the Crazy Horse village on up the Tongue. They don’t get any more wild than them two.”

  “Trouble is, Luther—about all that’s left are the wildest of the wild ones. The sort who won’t even consider surrender and a new way of life on the reservations. I’m coming to believe we really are going to have to rub out the last of these sons of bitches.”

  “Yellowstone” Kelly stood in silence for a few moments, watching until the last of the pack-mules disappeared from sight around the river bluff. Only then did he say, “But I will admit that you and Bruguier are giving it one hell of a shot, General. Sending that Cheyenne woman was a real stroke of genius on your part.”

  “I’ll say,” Miles agreed proudly. “More than pale hope, I have a good feeling this operation of mine will bear fruit by spring. If that detail of soldiers can find the hostile Cheyenne camp, and if that woman can slip the half-breed into camp without getting themselves killed, then they just might have a chance of convincing their leaders that I am a fair man.”

  “No better way of showing them just how fair you can be than to send the woman to tell firsthand how well the Bear Coat’s treated his prisoners,” Kelly replied. “They’ve been kept warm and dry, fed all they could possibly eat. A damn sight better those captives have had it here with your soldiers than those Cheyenne and Sioux have it in their camps right now.”

  “But that’s what keeps nagging me, Luther,” Miles confided to the twenty-eight-year-old scout. “I don’t know if this terrible cold and a hungry belly will cause a war chief to surrender … or make him want to fight on all the harder.”

  * * *

  Before Sitting Bull departed for the north country with his hundred lodges of Hunkpapa, he left fifty-four cases of fixed ammunition for the Crazy Horse people, bullets for hunting and for continuing the war.